


With All His Sinews Around His Neck

by distantgreen



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-25
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-28 23:33:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6350110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distantgreen/pseuds/distantgreen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mayuzumi observes Akashi trying to put himself together again.</p>
<p>Loose companion piece added at <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6449335">Awaken For a Brief While From Your Dark Night</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	With All His Sinews Around His Neck

“Chihiro.”

He's heard that name fall from Akashi's lips so many times in the past, but it sounds completely different now, when Akashi releases it into the darkness in a shaky, breathless whisper. There are meanings here that Mayuzumi still struggles to decipher, layers of confession and need and struggle that cling to him like cobwebs if he tries to claw his way through the nuances. It was always straightforward, with the old Akashi; your name was a command, a summons directed at an inferior creature. He's still inferior, he thinks with a hint of bitterness, but he's learned to accept that, around Akashi.

He thinks of the old Akashi and he wonders what it's like, to have your psyche rended in two like that, part of you a trapped observer while the other carries out all the things you couldn't bring yourself to do before. A switch seemed to flip back then, after their final game, swapping one entity out for another, but Mayuzumi has come to realize that it's not so simple as that at all. The reconstruction is slow, agonizingly so, full of nights where Akashi wakes at all the wrong hours and sits in stillness by the window, lost inside himself. Inferior creature that he is, Mayuzumi wonders if his presence helps in some small way, like a desperate child trying to glue a broken toy back together when the pieces won't quite fit like they should.

“Chihiro.”

Another exhale in the dark, and Mayuzumi's grip on Akashi's hips tightens ever so slightly.

–

Mayuzumi spends a lot of time buried in fiction, but being a reader makes you an attentive observer, and he notices things in the real world, too.

He notices the way the people around Akashi flinch sometimes, when his hands reach for the scissors, a distant memory flashing unbidden across their faces before dissipating. They don't even seem to catch it themselves, it passes so quickly, and he knows they certainly don't catch the almost imperceptible shift in Akashi's shoulders. Because Akashi sees a great many things, and of course he notices their discomfort every single time, however subconscious and small. Mayuzumi isn't even sure how well Akashi himself remembers the incident, if it's a precise, lucid thing, or if it sits like something distant and alien in his mind. It doesn't matter, anyway, because everyone else remembers for him.

The tension in his frame, marginal as it is, is never lost on Mayuzumi, and he is annoyed with everyone else for missing the things which seem so trivially obvious to him. He sees Akashi loop his slender fingers through the handle of the scissors and cut with assurance, no hesitation whatsoever in his grip. He always moves with confidence; the future, at least, is clear to him, and it's not the future he worries about, not the possibility of slipping, the point of the scissors driving where it doesn't belong, because he knows the odds of such a thing are nonexistent. It's the past that still hangs over him, fuzzy and uncertain, the last year like a heavy weight against the back of his neck, and Mayuzumi tries to tell himself that it's bound to get better eventually.

–

He's not the same Akashi, but he's not that different in many ways. He still asks things of Mayuzumi and expects them to be carried out, and Mayuzumi finds himself obliging more often than he'd like. Often enough, they're simple requests, seemingly inconsequential things, but they take on a new weight when it's Akashi who requests them.

“Read to me.”

Mayuzumi's sprawled out on the couch, taking up its full length, because he insists on taking what he can when he has the liberty to do so, as if to give himself some illusion of control. It doesn't faze Akashi, of course, who climbs on top of him and settles into an elegant little ball, cat-like and warm, as if Mayuzumi is the couch itself. Reading aloud was never of interest to Mayuzumi in the past; books were meant to be private things, an intimate game between you and the words on the page meant to take place entirely in your own head. It always seemed blasphemous to him, to break that sanctity.

But he doesn't seem to mind so much, with Akashi, probably largely because he's convinced that Akashi never listens to the content of the books anyway. It's his voice, he thinks, that Akashi is after, droning lazily into the warm afternoon air. Akashi doesn't care about the book; he just wants to know that Mayuzumi is _there_ , alive, doing the sorts of things that living creatures do, as if that gives him something to hold onto. He's like a newborn, Mayuzumi thinks, gradually trying to anchor himself tighter and tighter into the world.

–

Oftentimes Mayuzumi thinks that their best hope lies in basketball, even though it was basketball that drove Akashi to breaking in the first place. He doesn't know the feeling himself, but he can see it in Akashi's eyes, the way they catch the light changing slightly when the ball lands in his waiting hands, heavy and firm and tangible. It's something to hold, something to pass along, as if every time it glides through his grip, part of the weight that he carries can get transferred away. If he does it over and over again then maybe, little by little, the pieces that aren't meant to be there anymore will flake away with it, like a rough sponge dragged over old, dead skin, peeling and shedding and leaving something raw and pink and new underneath.

Mayuzumi tries to watch for any subtle hints of impending disaster when Akashi plays, although he knows there isn't anything in his power he could do to stop it if it comes, but either Akashi genuinely has no fear of ever breaking like that again, or he's buried it so deep and hidden it so well that even Mayuzumi can't find it. He can't see anything behind Akashi's small smiles after a particularly well-executed play to indicate doubt, and he wants to trust in the assurance that Akashi so easily wears, wants to believe in that stability. He doubts that Akashi's mind would survive another fracture of that magnitude, that such a thing could ever be patched back together, and he hopes he never has to test that theory.

–

Mayuzumi is so used to seeing Akashi take charge of people, proclaiming his absoluteness to the world, that he has a tendency to forget that the captain is actually the smaller and younger of the two of them. He remembers, now, as Akashi's body settles against him under the sheets, burning hot and sweaty, breathing still not quite evened out. It irritates him to think of it in such terms, as if physical shape and size have anything to do with anything, because Akashi looks whole and intact from the outside, he always did, and Mayuzumi has learned how wrong he was about all of that.

There's never been anything quite like Akashi in Mayuzumi's books, so when it comes to dealing with him in person, Mayuzumi sometimes feels like he's walking through uncharted wilderness, tossing guesses blindly into the dark and hoping that something works. He carefully slides one arm under Akashi's neck, letting the younger boy rest his head on it, and wraps the fingers of his other hand around one of Akashi's wrists. Their heartbeats have settled, but Mayuzumi can feel Akashi's pulse beneath his fingertips, and he's felt it often enough that he's at least managed to make some crude map of this one thing in his head. It feels like another disjointed night, this time, from the way it throbs against his skin. But there's nothing else to be done and nothing more to offer, so he shrugs mentally and lets himself start drifting off to sleep.

He will wait, and he hopes that things will be better in the morning.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from an old version of Humpty Dumpty, published in 1842 by James Orchard Halliwell:  
>  _Humpty Dumpty lay in a beck._  
>  _With all his sinews around his neck;_  
>  _Forty Doctors and forty wrights_  
>  _Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty to rights!_  
>   
> 
> alright I'm done trampling my filthy feet all over this pairing
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> (for now)


End file.
